Seasons

I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and have done computer programming as a hobby. I found this site through the Chatterbox Challenge site, which I found through the Jabberwacky site, which I found while searching the internet for good bots and finding a lot of disappointing ones.

Yeah, I have a "Scrivener" on the Jabberwacky site that's boring as hell because it's boring to make. I'm still feeding it its answers, just in a different, far more tedious way. Math is the language of the gods. I firmly believe that. I hear the answer is 42, but I never finshed the book.

I teach classes online. I used to teach high school before I started being a caretaker for my parents who have health issues (now I only work from the home). I found this site years back when teaching AP Psychology. It seemed fun and soon I tried to bring some characters I would like to talk with to life.

My degrees are in psychology, law and education, but I have no tech background so for purposes of this site you can put me in the "uneducated" box. Nothing I studied really relates to bots. I also tried to make a tutor bot for limited use a specific class, but I stopped developing him because ever since we switched to the new server the bot hangs up on any student who tries to access it though my class page (it used to talk to them before). Also "Guest153" takes away my desire to play with memory for students. There may be a solution to those issues, but honestly the bot wasn't well liked enough by the students to make it worth a lot of trouble. My favorite bots are the fun ones anyway.

I thought I'd heard you mention students. I can wax poetic about what this stuff is about (mainly to my mother and such, who worry about why I do this with my life instead of, oh, going outside). I don't work b/c I have severe neurological problems that finally really disabled me, so this site was a godsend -- I feel as if I have a job and colleagues. And, maybe in a year or two, I'll have students again, in the most important way. I wouldn't say your degrees make you uneducated at all -- education and psychology seem really useful here. Wish I knew more. I *hated* my education courses while being best friends with one of my teachers. (My ed/psych courses felt mutually antagonistic towards me.) Anyway, thanks for the post. Different backgrounds clearly don't make people better or worse for this site (well, maybe I could think of an exception); they're just different lenses to look at this through.

Clerk, you didn't think your education classes reflected serious "best practices" when you "shifted paradigms" and started "thinking outside the box" while raising your students' self esteem? Hee hee don't tell any employers, but I only got my Masters in Education because I needed classes to be certified and you may as well get a degree and a pay hike. Frankly, what passes for educational research in many cases would make my old Psychology professors cry, and I can only imagine what someone with a background in a "hard" science would think. Maybe my experience is not the norm, but I think many education degrees are just hoops people jump through for the sate where they work so it all looks good on paper. Meh.

It's good to teach. If you feel up to it, you may want to teach or tutor on line. You can do it part-time. If not, just enjoy the bots.

I think my Education classes might've helped render me certifiable. And my retired high school teacher of a mother keeps getting herself recertified for no reason in the world. Meanwhile she substitute teaches and goes to retired teachers' workshops. A close friend is supposed to be a professor emerita, has plenty to do at home, and still teaches. It's a disease in itself, teaching. Why'd I choose to be The Clerk, anyhow? 'Cause he would gladly learn and gladly teach.

I have a friend who's doing substitute teaching right now, and he was subbing for some class in which the material was talking about different forms of peer pressure. He noted that these were the same forms he had been taught to utilize to help keep students in line in his education classes. So he demonstrated some of the peer pressure forms to the students by showing them how they were utilized in classroom control, e.g., "And this moron right here thinks he can get away with turning around to talk to his neighbor, and now you're all laughing at him, which is a form of peer pressure."

i'm a 22 year old girl who works in a bakery and a call center. i did a lot of my old bots while i was being "kept" by my ex. i dropped out of college, but i know a bit about psychology from having been in therapy since i was about 10.

What a conglomeration! I guess I figured I was the odd man out because my programming is out-of-date. Just some smart people figuring out how to make it work. I haven't figured it out yet, but I have figured out a lot of the don'ts, which has to count for something.

If it's just one or two people talking in class, the stop dead, stare, and wait technique is fairly effective. Wait long enough, and the rest of the class starts shushing them.

When it's the whole class, a gentle reminder to "simmer down" takes care of 90% of it, then the wait and stare takes care of the rest.

Yeah. That was very necessary when kids had cell phones *that I couldn't take away because they were in college* that they would answer in class. I would just stop talking, we'd all be staring at the person, who would sometimes remain oblivious an amazing amount of time (oblivion is inherent to some kids in a required English class). Finally, they'd look up, and I'd ask them to hang up the phone and discuss how I hadn't thought to make a rule against what I thought was obviously distracting, counterproductive and, dare I say, rude. We'd all agree then and from then on, the rule was cell phones off unless you discuss why they're on (Dad's having surgery) and then to take them outside.

Amazing. But then, some people take the forums of the forge hostage.

I go with the catch all "respect" rule and deal with case by case issues, but it is a lot easier online than with teenagers in a public school. Even online, there are one or two times I had to put moderator on in live seminars and approve student comments because one or two really didn't seem to know that making fun of other students' religion and implying a classmate may be overweight may not be respectful in class. Honestly, my high school kids knew better than that.

If the high school students were being jerks, they were being jerks on purpose. That being said, I find the stare works with students who at some level want to pass the class, but if heaven forfend you find yourself in a room of young people waiting to drop out in a year who find annoying the teacher entertaining, or you have even one or two loud mouth jerks who want to prove they have power by acting stupid, you can try peer pressure and other methods, but behind that I need to be able to write people up and have INSTANT repercussions that mean more than time off of class. Meh. I say many public schools would be better if we could assign WORK detentions (i.e. cleaning the halls and bathrooms) but I may be old and bitter. Also I hate those movies where a teacher doesn't give up on lost causes and the kids all come around and really learn for the first time. The idea is that a good teacher can change any group of students no matter what with out books funding, backing from the parents, or backing by the administration. Also, they can mold any student and the student themselves have no role in making the decision to learn. That's nice, but why not make the students responsible for their own attitudes, the parents responsible for teaching behavior and the administration responsible for providing a safe, supportive environment and supplies instead of promoting the myth that teachers can do all that magically if only they really cared. Rant over.